Is there anything preventing these fucking nazis from becoming a domain registrar? Or finding a company with no morals willing to host their domain? I don't see why they can't do one of the above. There's no duty on the part of Godaddy, Google, or any other company to provide these fuckers with service. Let them figure it out themselves if they want to stay online. This isn't a free speech issue. They have the right to say whatever they want. They do not have a right to force others to help them say whatever they want.
No this isn't false equivalence, either all speech is free or no speech is free.
Where speech threatens one of your other freedoms then it should be judged on a case by case basis.
This also brings net neutrality into play, DNS is a core internet service, without it the internet cannot function.
We have now 2 internet service providers effectively refusing to provide services to some one based on political and subjective perception of the content rather than an objective one based in law.
This isn't even Google or GoDaddy giving a fuck about human rights, there are plenty of hate groups on Google Groups and plenty of subhuman content hosted directly on GoDaddy.
Do you think GoDaddy didn't knew what they were providing DNS services too? they do KYC both individually and collectively any internet service provider these days gets a threat report based on it's customers because of the threat of hacktivism.
Nazi's didn't rise in germany because they were allowed a platform to speak from, they've risen because they've silenced anyone who opposed them.
Silencing the opposition should never be acceptable to anyone that holds even a shred of liberal values.
Oh yeah! Let's hyper-simplify the socio-economic reasons Nazism got a footing into post-WW1 Germany. That'll help.
You're trying to apply free speech to dealings with a private company. They're not a government though. You get your service from Google, et al, at their pleasure. If you break their terms, they're well within their rights to show you the door. Don't like their terms, use another company or DIY.
We can chase the discrimination and protected-class-advantage rabbit down its hole, but really, this comes down to what Google (et al) considers criminal incitement to violence, which is a proven [1] exception to first amendment rights. Google doesn't have to prove things that far, but denying these violent racists their business is a good way to avoid becoming complicit.
> ... but really, this comes down to what Google (et al) considers criminal incitement to violence,
We have courts and a legal process to decide such things. I find it strange and worrying that so many in this thread are happy to let a huge yet private and unaccountable entity have such power.
Why do things need to be legally decided for Google's private owners to exercise their first amendment rights to tell violent fascists to expletive off?
People in this thread are happy with the situation because a) fuck fascists and b) DS can still hook their domains up via almost any registrar on the planet. I'm sure they'll find a fascist-friendly one somewhere and if they don't, they're free —funds allowing— to set their own up via ICANN.
Google's unique (and monopolous) power is in its influence; through search listing and ranking, and to a much lesser extent, through Google play presence. While we might need to have a conversation about what they are allowed to do in that respect, as far as I can tell neither of those apply here.
Legally speaking, I'm sure I would. These are protected classes but that doesn't put them beyond criticism.
Whatever Google did would likely have ramifications on people doing business with them. Just as Google has can stop serving fascist hate groups, you can stop using them if they do something you don't like.
But what are you saying? Are you saying that Google should have no say what it does with its resources?
That simply not true, it's the slippery-slope fallacy. Observe: "When you let them take away any weapons, they'll take away all the weapons. Therefore, it should be my right to own nuclear weapons".
> We have now 2 internet service providers ....
Domain registrars are not ISPs in any sense of the word, least of all the net neutrality sense of the word.
> Nazi's didn't rise in germany because they were allowed a platform to speak from, they've risen because they've silenced anyone who opposed them.
The two parts of that sentence directly contradict each other. The second part is (Not allowed free speech -> Inability to gain power).
>
That simply not true, it's the slippery-slope fallacy. Observe: "When you let them take away any weapons, they'll take away all the weapons. Therefore, it should be my right to own nuclear weapons".
It's not a slippery slope fallacy. It's the typical American view on free speech.
VS say Canada where Nazi's aren't protected in spreading their hate.
Actually they are ISPs, Net Neutrality goes way beyond if your ISP can throttle traffic based on content, that is the least important argument.
It's about the not having any discrimination based on the nature of content across the internet period.
And no it's not a slippery slope, freedom of speech is paramount, all speech should be free period, regardless of what stupidity comes out of someone's mouth.
You can be a holocaust denier racist spewing racist slur at orphans and as european jew whose parents were born in 1942 and then had to live behind the iron curtain will fight your right to say anything you want even if you would say that to me i might punch you in the face afterwards.
> No this isn't false equivalence, either all speech is free or no speech is free.
To quote another thread:
We already ban some kinds of speech, and I've never heard anyone complain about it. For instance, you can't stand on a street corner and try to recruit people to join ISIS. You can't threaten to hurt or kill someone. You can't show pornography to minors, or show anyone pornography that contains minors.
These are all very popular restrictions on free speech.
I’m stretching the definition a little in that case, but I don’t think it’s an untenable stretch. Speech is the act of expressing a thought. Art expresses thoughts as well. A movie, or a painting, or a book also expresses thoughts, which indicates a kind of kinship with speech.
And yet there are movies and books and paintings we probably shouldn’t share with certain people, certain thoughts which should not be expressed to the young. Americans are mostly in agreement with this curtailment of freedom of expression/speech.
As I said, I admit that I’m stretching the definition of speech a little with that example, but I think you’ll agree that the boundary between speech and action can be somewhat blurry at times.
If we are framing this as a free speech issue: Isn't spam email free speech?
How dare any network provider tell me I can't send 500 billion emails about my Viagra supplements? That is violating my freedom of speech!
The US government has actually passed laws making spam email legal (CAN-SPAM, under certain conditions), and still most every reputable network provider will not let you send it on their networks, even if it is legal.
I'm not suggesting the particular issue in the OP is the same as spam, but clearly there are some boundaries of free speech on networks that everybody seems to agree are good.
Former anti-spam guy here. Spam is hardly something everyone agrees on. There are big grey areas where people spam without thinking they're spamming, and yes they do get upset about it.
The primary moral and legal defence the big email providers have with respect to spam filters is that they're essentially democratic: they're powered by user reports. So if someone complains to Google that their mail goes into the spam folder, Google can just say "it's our users fault, figure out how to make them happy" and that's a good answer that puts them back in the driving seat. Also, users can whitelist mail if they disagree with the mail providers opinion. Spam is ultimately not a matter of politics then, it's a matter of aggregate user opinion on what sort of mail they want vs don't want.
This particular issue seems rather different. There are no user votes involved here and it's unclear why you'd want such a system anyway, given that people who disagree with a website can just not visit it. There is no way for visitors who disagree with Google's assessment to access the site anyway. And so on.
Generally, only content-based restrictions on speech are subject to strict scrutiny under the First Amendment, whereas "time, place, and manner" restrictions (e.g., noise ordinances) are more tolerated. Additionally, commercial advertising is less protected than other speech under the First Amendment.
Laws against spam do not target messages on the basis of their content (except in so far as they are commercial advertising, which is a less protected category of speech), so they are upheld as a "time, place, and manner" restriction.
> Laws against spam do not target messages on the basis of their content (except in so far as they are commercial advertising, which is a less protected category of speech)
I'm not a lawyer, but the parenthetical is doing a lot of work here.
Curious then - if you're okay with this removal, would you be okay with a registrar removing a site because it violated some Catholic values? Supported abortion or something say?
There are reasonable restrictions but generally such restrictions have a lot more to do with technical or usability issues rather than civil or political issues. I doubt this will be popular around here, but I'm afraid of being on a registrar that would reject my domain for saying something controversial.
EDIT: I can't even reply to some of the children here because HN is rate limiting me because I disagreed with a majority opinion - even only slightly - and got downvoted. Eugh.
To those saying this is false equivalence or a slippery slope, this is directed towards people saying "they're a private company, they can remove whatever they way" - which it certainly fits the parameters of without modification. No slippery slope here, a slippery slope means this would have to lead to another, which I'm certainly not saying here. Merely a hypothetical that I'm curious how people resolve. I'm not really intending it as a formal argument one way or the other, just wanted to hear different perspectives on it.
> would you be okay with a registrar removing a site because it violated some Catholic values?
Except, that didn't happen. But if there was a Catholics only registrar (and then, not all Catholics oppose abortion rights) and that website got booted I'm sure that lots of other websites would pack up and leave as well. Somehow I don't think this particular DNS entry not being hosted by Google is going to cost Google any customers.
Google seems to be in the right here. They aren't a government or even a clear monopoly as a name service provider.
The 1st prevents me from using government power to prevent people from saying things I disapprove of, but if they come into my house and say them, I can certainly demand that they leave.
We need more dumb-pipe-like services. It's one to fight SOPA-PIPA for something that affects directly your users and your business and it's another to being "forced" by pressure on social matters that don't directly affect your users/clients/business.
I would expect or rather hope that companies have their mission and strive on every chance to make that mission a fundamental reality with no compromises.
As much as I hate what the Daily Stormer does and what it represents, the reality is that such pressure can come in a different way in the future and be exploited for non-obvious cases. You open a pandora's box when things like that happens.
Yes. We've never had free speech on the internet. Or rather, we do, but only so far as you're free to set up your own server and host your own site and put whatever you want on it (and if you can't convince a domain registrar to give you a domain, you can always advertise its IP address, or maybe operate a Tor hidden service or something like that). But if you're not willing to host your own site, then free speech on the internet has only been an illusion.
Self-hosting doesn't solve free speech on the internet. The first person who doesn't like you will DDoS you off the net, and then you'll need to run and hide behind a service like CloudFlare. There are only a few such firms. If they've been pressured not to protect you because your opinions are deemed objectionable, then you effectively cannot publish online at all.
This is not a theoretical problem. After Quillette published the response of 4 scientists to the Google memo they were DDoSd off the net.
DDoSing is illegal, so I'm not sure what your point is. Saying "you don't have free speech because someone could do something illegal" isn't really an argument. You may as well say that someone could murder you, the only real difference is DDoSing is a lot more likely and a lot harder to catch the perpetrators.
There are indeed only a few such firms - but those firms are probably some of the most bulletproof in the entire industry.
BlackLotus hosted stormfront for years, CloudFlare hosts reams of controversial content - wikileaks, the pirate bay, 8chan, etc. They're practically known for it.
Currently at least, it's still quite possible to find a provider who will look out for their customers. In the registrar category there are a few providers who shine, DynaDot and EasyDNS have really gone to bat before.
That's a good point. There are plenty of Tor sites (most of them?) that are on Tor specifically because no private third party is willing to host their content. Let the bigots go to Tor and enjoy all the free speech they like, down in the darkness where they won't bother anyone who doesn't want to hear them.
> only so far as you're free to set up your own server and host your own site
Where? Your bedroom? You can and will be blocked by your ISP. Colo? Private facility and network interconnects. Outside the country? Blocked at the borders, or you have to register with a US company (.com is managed by a US company, as is .net; .org is a global company but still incorporated in the US).
Plugged directly in to the backbone? You can still be shut down by Level3 and its ilk (or by the terminating ISPs).
In short, I disagree that even by hosting your own site you can still avoid censorship by private companies.
> and if you can't convince a domain registrar to give you a domain
This is the problem. If nobody wants to host my speech, fine: I can set up a server in my own bedroom if need be. But if nobody accepts my domain, it's not quite so easy to set up my own registrar.
Private companies arbitrarily censoring domain names is a can of worms that shouldn't be opened. Registration must be held up to a higher standard, like an utility.
If I make a nazi movie nobody has to show it in their theatre. If I write a nazi book no publisher has to pick it up and print it.
If you want a nazi domain name system then go ahead and create it. Run a DNS server, advertise it as "this is the DNS for nazis" and you can have www.holocaustdenial.nazi all you want.
Providers of DNS services have terms of service. And arguably even if something is not in their terms of service if they deem it to be unacceptable then they are well within their rights as private companies to deny service. ISPs are all about access, the DNS is all about publishing and your ability to publish depends to a large extent on whether or not you will be able to find parties to work with to enable the publishing of the material you wish to spread.
Google is under no obligation to provide such a service to a party they deem objectionable (on pretty good grounds).
Considering that IP addresses you get from most service providers are dynamic you need a lookup system for others to be able to access your speech.
> they are well within their rights as private companies to deny service.
Many utilities are also private companies and they they are required to provide service anyway. So one does not strictly follow from the other.
That's why I said DNS providers should be considered utilities. At least the national-level ones. If resellers won't take it you should still be able to get it straight from the ccTLD registrar.
> Considering that IP addresses you get from most service providers are dynamic you need a lookup system for others to be able to access your speech.
Not on the hosting side.
> Many utilities are also private companies and they they are required to provide service anyway.
Yes, but they're not. DNS is a nice-to-have, not a must. Hosting is a must, if you want to make a case then you are going to have an uphill battle where a hosting provider would have to supply and and all paying customers.
It may be on a consumer account, but you can get a business account at a residential address from most providers; and in many cases you need to to get the balance of upstream to downstream to you'd want for hosting, even leaving aside ToS concerns.
Many utilities are also private companies and they they are required to provide service anyway.
That's because they're not exactly private companies; they're government-sponsored monopolies. If they weren't, and if there were real competition for the services they provide (like all of the other local businesses), then they wouldn't be required to provide services to any particular customer.
FWIW, I don't necessarily disagree with this and certainly think that it's a debate we should have.
OTOH, I think in the regime we do have, expecting Nazis to get a free pass for violating registration firms TOS is unreasonable, and granting such an exception, even silently by failure to enforce, would send a terrible message.
My point is that they (at least ccTLD registry operators) should not be allowed to have arbitrary ToS. As long as it is legal and the customer can pay non-discriminatory prices they should not have any leverage to remove them.
Just like you can't get kicked from your internet service, electricity or water providers for arbitrary reasons.
> Just like you can't get kicked from your internet service, electricity or water providers for arbitrary reasons.
Given that the net neutrality regulations which were adopted to actually explicit protect all lawful content and applications are unlikely to ever go into effect given the new FCC makeup, this is not true. Nothing stops ISPs today from having restrictive, content-based TOS restricting lawful activity.
That being said, I can appreciate the argument that DNS service should be covered in an even more expansive net neutrality framework than the one we almost had in the US.
Yes, I was assuming net neutrality. Without it the whole discussion is moot since your traffic could just get tossed out at any time by any provider along the route.
> This is made challenging by the fact that the entirety of the internet is composed of private parties.
The entirety of the internet is not composed of private entities. There are plenty of public entities that comprise parts of the internet. (And, in the US, those public entities are restricted in viewpoint discrimination when they create public fora.)
Now, it's true that private users in the US generally must deal with private vendors for internet services, and most of those services (including, e.g., DNS services) are neither public nor regulated-utility services, which does mean that lots of things one might want to do on the internet are subject to viewpoint discrimination by other private parties whose collaboration would be necessary for one to complete one’s intent.
> Should we simply stop expecting anything resembling free speech on the internet?
Free speech involves, fundamentally, the challenge of convincing others that your speech should be relayed. The internet is no different in that regard.
Of course, if this was leftist speech we were talking about, the "arguments" would be all about evil capitalists and the need for legislation to protect free speech.
There are tons of leftist sites advocating violent revolution. I haven't heard of a single one being denied domain registration (or being banned in any other way).
Ok, sure, there are actual Communist parties. That doesn't mean they're advocating violence, or actually causing real violence to occur.
revcom in particular seems like an ineffective hobby of one guy, based on Wikipedia [1].
Also, skimming around their website, I see calls to protest against fascism, but not calls to violence. [2] contains their "Points of Attention for the Revolution", which ends with We are going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way beyond the destructive, vicious conflicts of today between the people. Because we are serious, at this stage we do not initiate violence and we oppose all violence against the people and among the people
Freedom of speech is an ideal, not a government mandate - you are thinking of the first amendment, which requires the US Federal government to conform to the ideal. Monopolistic publishers that refuse to publish certain works are against freedom of speech.
No, but that doesn't end at domain services. There are may other parts of the chain from one 'convert' to the next that could be disrupted and a lot of that process centers around free speech. Allowing the speech is tantamount to taking a fairly large risk, the risk of one person being able to infect another with their meme. Hard to stop that from happening when free speech is sacred.
Google is a private entity, they could quite legally de-list all neo-nazi sites with zero consequences. Before Google newspapers were the primary source of people's information, was there a massive outcry that the New York Times and Washington Post didn't run neo-nazi stories?
How is this abuse? Is access to web-hosting a right now? Going back to my newspaper example, you might as well say possession of a printing press is a right.
If I violate the terms of my lease I can be evicted. If you violate your registrar's terms of service your website can be shut down. This is not a new concept, not is it somehow special because it's "on the internet".
Daily Stormer reportedly violated ToS, though when I checked ToS yesterday, it was pretty clear that they didn't outright ban such content, but yeah, they aren't abusing it, they're enforcing the rules Daily Stormer agreed to follow but failed to.
It absolutely is, just not with the government. If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing. Google is the second registrar to kick them out. I don't care for what they say, but if we want a free internet, we have to allow the good with the bad.
I mean we complain when China does it, how is this fundamentally different?
> I mean we complain when China does it, how is this fundamentally different?
Because a private company declining to participate in the hosting of somebody's speech is a hell of a distance from the government mandating blocking said speech? How is this even a serious question?
Random House probably isn't interested in publishing a neo-nazi racial superiority manifesto, either. That's neither a free speech issue nor "tantamount to Chinese censorship".
Undesirable speech removed from the internet via multiple registrars refusing to host DNS, vs undesirable speech removed from the internet via Chinese firewall has the same result: undesirable speech removed from the internet. That's the fundamental issue. That is not different.
Mandating that Google host this speech would constitute compelled speech, and violate the first amendment. Ironically, what you seem to desire here is something much more in line with China's conception of constrained freedom.
I desire anyone the ability to say anything on the internet without being squelched. I don't see how that is the same. If private companies want play that game, it's time to take the internet out of their hands.
The solution to that problem is to have a federalized registrar that will allow anyone to register anything and is required to uphold free speech laws as they apply to the internet.
> You aren't allowed to respond by gluing someone's mouth shut.
Refusing to actively collaborate in spreading someone else's viewpoint isn't gluing their mouth shut.
Now, if you want to argue that domain registration should be a public utility and not a private interaction where the service providers freedom of speech and association is protected, that's perhaps a reasonable argument. But that's not the status quo.
I'd rather argue for neither. Name-to-number resolution is too much of a strategic choke point to allow anyone to have too great a degree of control over it.
But in the system we have now, domain registrars and DNS providers should not be engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination against the domain owner, or in content-based discrimination against anything they may have on their servers.
I can certainly condone web hosting service companies embargoing troublesome customers, but anything closer to infrastructure than that should not be cut off for any reasons other than failure to pay the bills.
> If we cheer this, we are cheering the death of free and public internet.
I don't think it is that simple. ISIS does just fine on the web, I'm sure Neo Nazis will do just fine as well. But that's no reason why the IT giants of the planet should aid and abet them.
Television stations, radio stations and newspapers all decide which editorials to air or stories to cover. There's no requirement that they provide every organization equal time to present whatever they think might be valuable.
Perhaps if DNS service was regulated as a utility, or if Google was an arm of a state or federal government, there might be something to your argument.
Anyone can start and distribute a newspaper. Not everyone can broadcast on a spectrum (there are technical reasons to now allow that). If you think of a website as a newspaper, and there are similarities, then this in effect is a private entity preventing someone from publishing and distributing a newspaper.
In the same way that anyone can start a newspaper, anyone can also start a website. In the same way that someone needs to sell the newspaper vital supplies like paper and ink, so to do websites need to have network providers and web servers.
If you think that a pro-Nazi newspaper would have no problem setting up shop, you are sorely mistaken. They will have the same problems as this website and people of conscience will refuse to have them as clients. This website, as would those newspapers, will need to find suppliers sympathetic to their views.
That few people are sympathetic to their views, in my opinion, is the market at work.
That's what I've been thinking. Maybe Namecoin (.bit) should be taken up by all "Free speech extremists", regardless of which side they are advocating. By Free speech extremists I mean people who agree that Nazi sites should have a registrar, regardless whether you agree with the Nazis or not.
>Is it really that hard for people to understand that the first amendment only applies to the federal government?
That's the standard fallback of authoritarians. The law says the government can't ban speech, but the spirit of free speech, particularly on something like the internet, should be protected.
> If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing.
the whole point of the net neutrality folks is ensuring that ISPs can't keep them from accessing whatever sites they want, isn't it?
if it is in some sense OK for google to refuse these domain registrations, is it also OK for google (and then comcast, etc etc) to refuse to carry the packets for these sites?
It would be wrong for Comcast to drop packets for specific websites, if Net Neutrality was still a thing. Google is a private company and can refuse to service customers.
If they choose to base themselves on extremist idealogy, it is their problem to figure out how to sustain themselves let alone craft its own monetization plan!
One perspective is that Google runs their own DNS that many people and services use as a convenience.
Also, as I get chastised for using Bing (because they pay me) and much of their traffic comes from browser defaults, it's arguable that if they stopped hosting on google.com it may not be that negative of an impact.
To the same degree, note that Amazon CHOOSES not to list their more specific apps in the google store and force customers to download THEIR store and change their phone permissions.
You weaken your own rights by choosing to interpret "speech" literally instead of as participation in public communications and discourse, which increasingly occurs over channels that do not require everyone to be within shouting distance of each other. Freedom of the press now extends further than a literal ink-on-paper printing press, to digital publication on an http server.
Delisting a domain from the DNS is metaphorically equivalent to raiding the premises of a newspaper publisher and ripping the banner off the front page of each printed copy, while leaving the remainder intact, so that anyone attempting to read the latest copy of that paper would not be able to find one, even if they were standing on a stack of them. It is backdoor censorship, by attacking people's name-based associations.
> Delisting a domain from the DNS is metaphorically equivalent to raiding the premises of a newspaper publisher and ripping the banner off the front page of each printed copy, while leaving the remainder intact, so that anyone attempting to read the latest copy of that paper would not be able to find one, even if they were standing on a stack of them. It is backdoor censorship, by attacking people's name-based associations.
No, it isn't. It is merely saying that you won't take an entry in your copy of the phone book, but you're free to petition the other issuers of phone books and you're free to create your own phone book.
Which kicks the can down the road to the issuer of the phone book book, which is not obligated to list any particular phone book in it, including the one you created yourself, because no one else would list your number in theirs.
Do you think it acceptable for casual users of the phone network to keep their own list of phone books that include self-published phone books that the major phone book book publishers won't list?
> Do you think it acceptable for casual users of the phone network to keep their own list of phone books that include self-published phone books that the major phone book book publishers won't list?
I didn't really get your point, too many books in it. Care to rephrase it, please?
> You weaken your own rights by choosing to interpret "speech" literally instead of as participation in public communications and discourse, which increasingly occurs over channels that do not require everyone to be within shouting distance of each other.
Are you implying that every online community and service should be forced to accept absolute freedom of speech?
Porn is speech, should YT and Fb be forced to host porn?
It's a little different with domain registrars, particularly when two of the biggest ones blocked a domain from registering. A power the US government gave them. Also, no one is saying "force," you are injecting that as a straw man. Just because people think free speech is something worth fighting for rather than actively fighting against because sometimes it is distasteful, doesn't mean we want the government to force anything.
Also, Google and GoDaddy sure forced Stormwhatever to not be accessible through their domain name. Again, using power given to them by the US government.
Do you believe you are actively fighting against the freedom of this group to speak? Do you see where some people would think you are? Do you think that will come back to bite you in the future?
With no requirements that they should not refuse service to anyone.
> Also, no one is saying "force."
Then what are you saying? Should Google be "xxxxx" to accept Stormwhatever? What is "xxxxx"? Honest question, what are you proposing?
> Again, using power given to them by the US government.
And doing so per the conditions specified by the US government.
First Amendment lawyer Ken White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."
That's a good question, thanks for keeping the gray cells going.
So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it. The registrars were then privatized, which I don't particularly have a problem with, but since the internet was created with public funds, it should allow the freedoms the government gives us.
Like I said, I'm not suggesting Google be forced to do it, but the US government should run a "public option" registrar that protects the freedom of speech / expression that putting up a website provides. If the government feels like they should ban a website, allow it to go through the court system and see if they agree. With privatization, we don't have the court system to go through (well we do, but since it's a private company, courts probably won't hear it.) That would be a good solution for me. Let Google keep their censoring and data collection if they want.
> So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it.
Very little of the current infrastructure was built with public funds Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure around the world come from companies, some government owned, some private.
> The registrars were then privatized
Actually, they weren't. They never existed in a public fashion. You're mixing up registry and registrar.
Today, it isn't a monopoly, so anyone can create their own registrar if they want. So if they don't find a registrar wanting to do business with them, they can spend a few thousand $ and create their own.
On the "government-run neutral registrar", I'm not sure if that's a good solution. I've rarely ever seen a government keep something neutral...
I'm not Clubber, but I think Google should choose, by their own volition, to accept Daily Stormer in order to promote freedom of speech and an open internet. In the same way sense that the rich "should" donate to charity even if there isn't necessarily a legal or moral obligation to. They should do it because the world is a better place with the open exchange of ideas.
I am implying that the internet is now communications infrastructure, and should therefore be equally open to all comers.
Domain registration and DNS are [nearly] essential now, in the same way that street signs are essential for a road network. If your city council decides to rip out the street sign that labeled the street you live on, such that visitors could not easily locate your house, and mail would not be delivered in a timely or reliable fashion to your mailbox, do you think you might have grounds to complain?
Assigning a street name and postal address to your lot is not the same as building a house on it.
So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
If Cthulhu comes up to your desk chewing on half of a Dagonite cultist, you accept its business, and charge it exactly the same fee per month as you just charged smiling baby Jesus holding two cute kittens for his domain registration. The amount of editorial control you may exercise is inversely proportional to your power to influence the entire Internet. Since domain registration is right there at the center and has such great power, you do not get to color the whole Internet with your own personal values.
> So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
Google or GoDaddy aren't running the DNS system, or even street signs.
They are running a phone book service, which is also run by many other companies, each under their own ToS. They can reject service to anyone (well, except protected classes).
Root level domains are part of DNS. You have to go through a registrar to get listed in a root level domain (.com, .net, etc). So yes, if they block you from registering in a top level domain and you don't have an alternative, you are blocked from DNS, at least the public one.
But there in lies the problem. Private companies don't want the stink of Stormwhatever associated with their name in the press and are more likely to banstick them because profit.
I think the best solution is a public option registrar.
Been on that train for a while. Ever since Twitter banned Milo, who I'd never heard of until reading a news article about him being banned, the internet in the USA is slowly resembling the internet I experience in China whenever I visit the mainland. And the slippery slope is greased with "but muh private companies" even as these private companies become more and more monopolistic and indistinguishable.
Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread. Germany learned that the hard way, I'm curious how the USA will deal with this and if they will manage to control it while keeping the free speech laws. I don't know which way it will go but I can see some problems.
I also wonder how many of the 300+ million Americans are now quiet converts waiting in the wings. Scary times.
There is nothing magical about Nazism; it's not some kind of special Pandora's box waiting to spring upon an unsuspecting public. It's just one of many ideologies that appeal to people who feel oppressed by giving them the easy target of vulnerable populations on whom to blame their misfortunes.
That it happened to be the ideology used to horrific ends in the industrialized world last century is much more a product of its moment in history than due to anything unique about the ideology itself.
The poisonous seed isn't the problem - rather, the ground fertile to it must be tended so that it will reject such things taking root.
Well, without the seed the ground would lie fallow. It needs both, not either one or the other and while it is definitely a requisite that the ground be tended that's a hard problem revolving around education and a general idea of ones place in the world and what rights and obligations we all have. And in spite of trying for a long time we have yet to come upon an infallible way of making these things known to all.
Nazism is a meme, just like stupid cat videos and the bible. It spreads from person to person seeking fertile ground in terms of an easy to identify scape-goat and an association with trouble experienced in a persons life. Allowing such memes to spread unchecked is playing roulette with open societies, the question then becomes whether you'd prefer free speech if it becomes the deciding factor in whether or not a thing like that can take root on a scale that it could cause a disaster or whether you forgo free speech to some extent in order to squelch the problem before it gets out of hand. Note that the Nazis themselves were not exactly free speech fans.
So even if it isn't a necessity it certainly will help to make it grow, and will allow it to grow faster.
Your rationale is exactly what every dictator throughout history has used to protect their power. Every, single, one. You either have free speech and allow all to express their ideas unfettered, or you will end up in a dictatorship sooner or later, guaranteed. To be clear, i'm talking about expressing ideas like "men and women differ biologically" and not speaking about threats/fighting words. Once you start punishing people for their ideas you're on the road to dictatorship, at least if every dictatorship in history is any guide.
Right, that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships. Come on, that's not even trying. If anything the USA is more at risk of becoming a dictatorship than many other democracies.
You're not going to see any trouble anywhere - except on private property - for expressing ideas such as 'men and women differ biologically', note that no government you'd care to list here has ever suppressed speech like that.
But Nazism is on a different level, and if you're willing to go down that road protecting the free speech of Nazis you really have to be very optimistic about human nature. I keep hearing echoes of 'it can't happen here'. But I believe it can happen, and it probably can happen everywhere. The question is if we will let it and what it will take to stop it once the ball starts rolling.
You seem to defend the idea that 'limitations to free speech lead to dictatorships' by defining a dictatorship as 'any government that puts limitations on free speech'.
You could make just as a valid (and philosophers like Popper have) that allowing unfettered free speech has also led every society that tried it down the road to dictatorship.
Dictatorship is one of the easy to find local minima of human organization, that we have to fight everyday not to slip down towards. You do that by accepting the humanity of your opponents, finding reasonable compromises, and there's no reasonable compromise to be had with the Nazi ideology, just ask the dead.
> Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread.
I have two rather distinct objections to this line of thinking. One is that this isn't especially true. To name one semi-controlled experiment: Germany has laws against using Nazi symbols, denying the Holocaust, and so forth, and yet the crypto-neo-Nazi NPD pulls down hundreds of thousands of votes every election--not enough to win anything aside from one European Parliament seat, but a significant number anyway. Meanwhile, the US has no laws against neo-Nazi expression and also doesn't seem to have very many more neo-Nazis per capita--even in Charlottesville, the neo-Nazis numbered in the high dozens to low hundreds and were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters.
A more philosophical objection is that you don't want to go into the business of deciding what ideas are too dangerous to express, because there's a greater risk that any institution with the power to make and enforce that judgment call will abuse that power. This is also a lesson that Europe learned the hard way, but seems to have forgotten.
But Germany has so far managed to keep the NPD on the fringe. The number of votes they get is low enough that it can be considered a safety valve of sorts. More interesting would be to see how Germany would react if the NPD got within striking distance of control of the Reichstag.
As for your second point, ideas may be too dangerous to express and you're still free to express them. But that's no reason to hand someone a megaphone to express those ideas and I think that Europe learned that there are points in time where small changes can have large effects, and that some of those effects can get out of control. So they tried (and possibly failed, but so far so good) to put mechanisms in place to stop a re-occurrence of recent history.
Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.
> Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.
Likewise, a lot of what's happened in Europe does not have a parallel in the USA. Elections have been seriously contested and sometimes won by the likes of Golden Dawn, Le Pen--both father and daughter--the BNP, Alessandra Mussolini, Jorg Haider, and so forth. Sure, in Europe you don't have a hundred white nationalists marching down the street carrying swastika flags, but you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.
> you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.
We're working on it. The last batch of elections was pretty scary but so far so good. If WWII wasn't enough to teach the world a lasting lesson you have to wonder how bad it would have to get before we will. Quite possibly it can not be done and we will occasionally revert to type.
The scary thing is that WWII is quickly passing out of living memory. In the next 20 years, there will start to be a critical mass of voters who have never MET anyone who was an adult in WWII.
By constructing the mechanism by which one may deny a bad guy any platform, you now have a mechanism that may be used to deny any other kind of person a platform. Such a thing is more dangerous than any individual bad guy, and will--very ironically--eventually fall into the hands of a person as bad or worse than that bad guy you were trying to stifle in the first place.
Censorship cannot triumph over evil, because it is evil in itself. The only reasonable counter is constant vigilance and tireless opposition. Furtive, deceitful whispers in the shadows call for floodlights and truth. Open demonstrations call for larger counter-demonstrations. The effective counter to objectionable speech is not censorship, but speaking the objection.
Absolute free speech is fundamentally incompatible with a free and fair society.
Allowing some forms speech has an incredibly chilling effect on other forms of speech, or on the safety of people.
Even America does not have absolute free speech (Although its further on this spectrum then all other Western democracies.) See - fighting words, direct incitements to domestic violence (Indirect domestic ones of the winkwinknudgenudge ones are fine, as are direct ones that incite violence against foreign persons or nations.)
That's not quite what happened in Germany. After the Beer Hall Putsch, there was a 5 year period where the Nazis would get into violent street clashes with members of the communist party.
Reacting to the Nazis with violence was tried in Germany. And it backfired very badly.
Yes, because driving them underground onto the dark web, without any adult supervision is a way better idea right? You drive these groups underground and one day are going to seriously regret doing so.
We are in the midst of a cultural civil war. The funny thing is that the more you suppress their ability to protest and their speech, the more converts you're making.
Maybe we should start by asking WHY these groups are getting more popular, why they are so enraged and angry and suddenly are out front airing their frustrations. And saying this is all about Trump is simply masking something that has clearly been brewing for a long time prior to this.
Every society has a population of disenfranchised people that can be turned to the tune of the right words. That's not unique to Trump followers, or even the USA.
What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.
Pushing it underground is maybe ineffective as a sole strategy but making it seem acceptable is also not right.
Lots of these people only do this because they feel they have cover.
>> What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.
In that last decade, apparently not much - which is why you have the problem you have now. This idea of doing something has not been done at all, but now all the SJW's have their hammers out and now everything looks like a nail.
It doesn't work like that. In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.
> In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.
I agree with that. Until we're talking about a party whose sole purpose is to take away those rights from others. That's one rule in the democratic playbook that we should all subscribe to and that should be a prerequisite for being allowed in the sandbox.
Reminds me of this whole circus from my alma mater's reunions this year:
>The Princeton University’s class of 2012 had plans to dress up for their five-year reunion, but their choice of wearing stormtrooper masks from Star Wars got derailed when someone used the magic word -
Amusingly, an alum quipped on a FB post at the time about actual holocaust survivors not having raised a fuss about the term when the original films came out in the 70's.
Well, that last part can be explained by the Empire being a generic metaphor for oppressive regimes. The Empire wasn't exactly a morally ambiguous character.
> Empire being a generic metaphor for oppressive regimes
It wasn't always like this. The best example is the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus, with its Pax Romana and everything related to it, which wasn't seen as a bad thing by lots of writers during the centuries that followed it. The second example that comes to mind is the Investiture Controversy from the early Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_Controversy), which saw the Papacy ideologically battling it out against the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire was definitely not seen as oppressive or anything the like.
On a more generic note, us Christian Orthodox use the phrase "The Empire from the Skies" (my not so good translation, here's the wiki article on it in Romanian which literally translates as "God's Empire" : https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Emp%C4%83r%C4%83%C8%9Bia_...), and, again, the term "empire" is not seen as oppressive or anything similar, quite the contrary.
Perhaps, but there aren't exactly "many sides" to a group chanting "gas the kikes" and celebrating the murder -by-car of a counter-protestor. There's no moral grey-area here.
That's exactly the reason why it exists in the first place.
Racist viewpoints? COVERED
Misogynistic viewpoints? COVERED
Satanism, Cults and "questionable" religious groups? COVERED
Pedophiles and MBLA? COVERED
Websites that advocate illegal drug use? COVERED
Websites that advocate political assassination? COVERED
Websites that advocate killing law enforcement officers? COVERED
There are limitations to free speech, but the reason it EXISTS is not cover speech YOU approve it, it's for speech people you DO NOT agree with and viewpoints that aren't popular.
This is the problem I have with people who say they support freedom of speech, but when it comes to groups like ANTIFA, BLM and others on the left, it's ok to shut down white supremacist websites, but not others exposing the same thing, just on the other side of the aisle.
You can't have it both ways, that's why freedom of speech covers EVERYBODY equally.
Except that 'antifa' is Anti Fascism, which is a pretty good thing except of course when you're a fascist and BLM does not say 'but white lives do not matter', it is usually interpreted as 'black lives matter too'.
It takes a special kind of warp to see either of those as spewing hate, whereas it is pretty easy to why people in general believe Nazis spew hate.
Saying "antifa" are simply anti-fascists is like saying "nazis" are simply nationalist socialists. There are extremist groups on either side of the ideological spectrum. (which often share a lot of ideologies too)
>You can't have it both ways, that's why freedom of speech covers EVERYBODY equally.
Actually, you can, that's why there are free speech exceptions in US law and protected classes? Hate speech and hate crimes are a real thing.
Also "ANTIFA" (it's "Antifa" lol) and BLM aren't monolithic groups - one is an ideology dedicated to fighting fascism and the other is a social justice movement consisting of many decentralized local community orgs. Neither of these are comparable to Nazis literally shouting to gas kikes in the streets and running over peaceful protesters and if you think they are, you might want to check yourself.
Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, "the law"--as some have curiously called it--can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes' quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.
those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago.
Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough
Holmes' famous quote is the go-to argument by appeal to authority for anyone who wants to suggest that some particular utterance is not protected by the First Amendment. Its relentless overuse is annoying and unpersuasive to most people concerned with the actual history and progress of free speech jurisprudence. People tend to cite the "fire in a crowded theater" quote for two reasons First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute. Saying it is not an apt or persuasive argument for the proposition that some particular speech is unprotected, any more than saying "well, some speech is protected by the First Amendment" is a persuasive argument to the contrary. Second, people tend to cite Holmes to imply that there is some undisclosed legal authority showing that the speech they are criticizing is not protected by the First Amendment. This is dishonest at worst and unconvincing at best. If you have a pertinent case showing that particular speech falls outside the First Amendment, you don't have to rely on a 90-year-old rhetorical flourish to support your argument. Holmes' quote is the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.
From your own linked Popehat article: 'except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action'
[Full Excerpt]
The damage Holmes inflicted — the malleable and unprincipled standard of censorship he drafted — was not thoroughly rebuffed until a half-century later. Brandenburg v. Ohio states the modern standard:
These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. . . . A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.
Note that Brandenburg does suggest, explicitly, that some speech is unprotected by the First Amendment. But people seeking a generic pro-censorship quote go to Holmes, not Brandenburg, and well they should — Schenck supports a loose and unprincipled interpretation of what the "fire in a theater" might be. [Edit: as a commenter points out, note that to be fair to Chayes she does mention Brandenburg even though she opens with Schenck.]
CloudFlare was also providing anti-DDOS capabilities to this site. It's one thing to defend people's right to free speech from the government, it's another to provide security services for hate speech.
Even hate speech is free speech. The public private nature of the internet is the only issue here. I am really getting scared and disgusted by all the 'nazi punchers' showing themselves here. To support someones right to free speech is not the same as supporting the content of said speech.
Many people disagree. Many countries[0] have laws against hate speech. In Canada, for example:
> it is a criminal act to "advocate or promote genocide" — to call for, support, encourage or argue for the killing of members of a group based on colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.[1]
"Stirring up or inciting hatred" is also against the law.
I have no doubt that The Daily Stormer would be illegal in Canada.
Also illegal, under another part of the Criminal Code, is assault; including "nazi punching". Not everyone who thinks websites like this should be shut down support physical violence against those they disagree with.
There is no slippery slope here -- shutting down hateful propaganda is not the same as full blown censorship: a provision prevents "people from being charged with a hate crime if their statements are truthful or the expression of a religious opinion."[1]
I know that might sound scary to some of you (who gets to decide what is true, or what is a religious belief?), but in Canada, we're lucky enough to have reasonable judges. The system works pretty well -- check out [1] for a few examples, and you can see what you think of the courts decisions.
> To support someones right to free speech is not the same as supporting the content of said speech.
Supporting someone's right to free speech doesn't mean enabling them to.
I support the right of the Nazis to voice their (IMHO completely absurd) speech, but if I had a business, I'd have guidelines against that type of speech in my business. In the same way, I wouldn't welcome one into my house. None of those measures infringes on their freedom of speech.
And it's not on registrar hold. There is a transfer lock
which is automatic because it was just transferred in.
So it's unclear what BI even means by 'cancelled'.
Something doesn't sound right about this story actually.
They certainly don't have grounds to delete the domain based on this:
"The extremeist site published a critical story about Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed when a car rammed into counter-protesters in Charlottesville, VA, over the weekend. The story prompted GoDaddy to give Daily Stormer 24 hours to find a new host for its domain."
Not to mention hard to believe godaddy would have said something like that either.
Registrant represents and warrants that:...registering or directly or indirectly using the Registered Name will not violate any applicable laws or regulations, legal rights of others, or Google’s rules or policies including:
It would seem to include rules and policies not listed in the terms.
> You acknowledge and agree that you shall not use Services in a manner, as determined by us in our sole and absolute discretion:
> To display or advertise pornographic, X-rated, sexually explicit, or otherwise tasteless materials, images, products or services (including, but not limited to: massage, dating, escort or prostitution services);
GoDaddy probably (it is at their discretion) finds the Daily Stormer to be tasteless.
He said probably, but even if it doesn't this is an easy decision for Google. Imagine that they did not do this, the next headline would be: "Google even more evil than GoDaddy, enables Neo Nazis".
Domain registrars have no business doing this. Originally, they just registered domains for ICANN. Now they act like they own them and just rent them out.
Domain registrars are not obliged to give service to anybody. If you register a domain you are given the use of a nice-and-easy-to-remember alias for your IP address. Whether or not the registrar will want to do business with you is their problem, that's a transaction between consenting parties, not an obligation on the part of the supplier. Whether ICANN accepts a registration or not is another matter, and so far ICANN has not been involved here.
So stormfront is free to shop around until someone wants their business or they can use their IP address, assuming they'll find at least one party willing to host them.
This same argument could be made for gay couples who want service for their gay wedding. We already set the precedent that a business cannot refuse service for customers it finds objectionable. You are essentially arguing in favor of the christian bakery refusing the gay wedding cake. So I don't think you can have it both ways, you either force people to do business with those you find objectionable or you dont.
> We already set the precedent that a business cannot refuse service for customers it finds objectionable.
Incorrect; we've already established in law a small set of narrow protected bases of discrimination in public accommodation. Outside of those categories (or in business relationship that are not within the scope of public accommodation, regardless of basid) a business absolutely can refuse service to customers it finds objectionable.
Discrimination based on advocacy of race-based violence does not, it should be noted, fall into any of those protected categories.
That's a real question in California. The Unruh Civil Rights Act has been held to be broad enough to cover white supremacist affiliation.[1] There are a few cities, including Washington, D.C., which specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of political affiliation.
That report is a trial court decision (with no precedential weight), and, in any case, the issue here (explicitly in GoDaddy's case, and likely also in Google's) is incitement of violence, not “white supremacist affiliation”.
Last time I checked, most of the stormfront members and most of the alt-right aren't committing any crimes against people who are coloured, just like how homosexuals don't commit crimes against heterosexual people.
Since you seem to have rejoined Hacker News just to post ideological flamebait, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
You realize that you are equating Christians with homophobes here and there are a very large number of Christians that would strongly object to that.
Muslim employee in supermarket that refuses to handle bacon: fine, plenty of others to take their place, and it only affects that person.
Bigot in supermarket refusing to bake cake for homosexual: you serve the company customers at the whim of your employer, wear your bigotry for all to see and give the supermarket a bad name and you're in hot water.
See how easy it is to rephrase that and not have a conflict? The problem is that you chose to phrase your example in such a way that you could - narrowly - infer doublethink but all you really managed to do is expose yourself.
Google didn't take away their domain. The domain is still owned by Daily Stormer. Google just refused to accept it to be transferred to them which is perfectly within the rules of ICANN.
Why do you think that Google doesn't have the right (business) to do this? They are not the sole registrar. Is there some contract with ICAAN which specifies this as a duty owed?
> Originally, they just registered domains for ICANN. Now they act like they own them and just rent them out.
This is exactly backwards. Google is refusing to act like they own them. They're refusing to have anything to do with them.
Indeed, I know now that I will never own a domain via GoDaddy or Google. GoDaddy was already a known bad actor, but Google is an interesting one to add to that list.
Buy only from those who are willing to host controversial content - DynaDot has secured the wikileaks domain for years for example and gone to bat for them in court. That's the type of thing I want from a registrar. Those who don't protect their own customers are not worth a penny.
Why do we need registrars at all? They don't seem to do a whole lot, but they charge quite a bit for it. The "service" they provide is handed down from a pseudo-government organization.
I suppose someone needs to resolve naming conflicts, and charge rent so unused domains eventually go away.
I wonder if anyone's made a DNS system where the registry can detect conflicts but doesn't actually know what domains you own. So you pay $10 for some encryption key or something, which happens to correspond to a domain, but nobody including the registrar can tell which domain the key maps to. If you stop paying, the domain stops resolving; but nobody knows who's paying.
What is the option for someone to register a domain name if every domain registrar refuses to do business with them? I may have the terminology wrong, since the domain is registered but needs to be transferred to another registrar.
Regardless of the topic, censorship (private or public) can never be an acceptable reaction. To quote Louis Brandeis (Supreme Court Justice): "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
EDIT: I was not expecting to be downvoted when quoting a SCOTUS Justice arguing for openness of debates, education and spreading of knowledge. I'm savoring the irony.
This is a stronger comment if you first make the case that refusal to do business with someone is censorship.
I mean, I see at least a vague analogy between not doing business with Nazis and not inviting boring people over for dinner. Is choosing dinner guests censorship?
It becomes censorship when all accesses to a medium (ie. DNS resolvers) are privatized. In other words, if all private providers refuse them access to a medium and if we agree this people still have rights, there is nothing in place to defend these rights. The collective action to refuse them access is therefore censorship.
So what you're suggesting is that DNS and domain registration and web hosting should all be public services operated by the government, because only the government is obligated to protect internet content from censorship? Or are you simply arguing that private businesses should be required to accept money from anyone to host any content, including content that is illegal in other countries or content that is against their personal beliefs?
Those are real questions to which I don't have an answer.
Although I don't believe web hosting is the problem here. Anyone can build a server and have it accessed using his own IP. So censorship (by design or as a byproduct) would be hard to achieve (except DDoS obviously).
Registrar are a lot more relevant because they are a service that make internet addresses intelligible to humans. So preventing one from accessing this service (either by design or as a byproduct) is an hindrance to their ability to communicate more broadly the content of their server. Same goes with search engines BTW.
Also, there is another solutions worth exploring: decentralized DNS registration.
(I'm not aware of anything restricting me from setting up a server that answers DNS queries with quotes from Dune, it's just that, because I'm not following the convention, pretty much everyone would just ignore it)
The issue at hand is not about serving the DNS but registering a DNS. One could serve its own domain name server as long as they have been able to register it first. Unfortunately, not everyone can become a registrar. And if all registrar refuse to register you, you don't have a domain name.
So you're arguing a private business has no right to refuse to do business with an individual customer, for any reason? What's your reasoning behind that? Are you against personal liberty and freedom, or do you believe the liberties of the Daily Stormer's operators somehow override the liberties of the people who operate Google's domain registration services?
I do not see a problem with Google refusing service to the Daily Stormer. However, the story started with GoDaddy kicking them out then Google refusing their services.
Two occurrences are too few to infer a trend, but enough for me to start wondering: DNS providers are all private companies.
So what would happen if provider after provider the site goes after denies them their services? Does the union of the these refusals amount to censorship?
In principle, it's only the union of individual private refusal. But in effect the Daily Stormer is barred from DNS service access.
Also, I did not think that I would need to clarify, but this is a legitimate, non-partisan question. The arguments are still valid regardless of the object of the topic.
Always good to keep the following quote often attributed to Voltaire in mind : "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Google is not preventing the Daily Stormer from spewing their swill. They aren't interfering with the Daily Stormer's rights in any way. They're just refusing to support the Daily Stormer on their commercial platform. In that, Google is well within their rights. The Daily Stormer is capable of taking their business elsewhere.
Of course Google has that right. I question whether it will have the intended effect, though. Pretty sure isolating extremists tends to cause further extremism.
No, isolating the communities from which extremists are drawn causes further extremism, isolating extremists does not.
There is a challenge in isolating extremists while not isolating (and, indeed, productively engaging) the communities from which members are radicalized, and quite often brute-force efforts to isolate extremists (especially ones keying on race, nationality, and religion) end up isolating the feeder communities with the extremists, which is about the worst possible outcome.
Actually they are not. Once a domain is transferred it has a 60 day lock on it and can't be transferred to another registrar. It can only be transferred back to the losing registrar if there is some of accident or other clearly defined reason. This is to prevent people from shifting domains around primarily to avoid IP enforcement or UDRP problems.
Honestly this is a terrible precedent they have here. I am surprised they are doing this (if true and hence why I questioned the entire story) because it puts them at a disadvantage in future cases as far as 'why didn't you stop xyz domain registration that is now responsible for my child's death after I wrote to you and put you on notice'.
The fact that they were evicted from Go Daddy and only briefly (an hour) registered with Google is really the Daily Stormer's problem akin to your shifting domains around to avoid IP enforcement example.
The more Google chooses what content is hosted on their platforms, the less authentic their claims of independence from the content and the more liability to which they should be exposed.
The funny thing about hate speech is that no one can make a unanimous conclusion for what hate speech is.
Nowadays hate speech is a euphamism for any idea or opinion someone doesn't like, so the term hate speech has lost its meaning. It now means using gender pronouns to refer to people, using gendered job names, saying that men and women are born with different brains, saying that there's only 2 genders, saying that feminism is cancer, saying there's a link between islam and terrorism, saying that black people underachieve in society due to genetics instead of the evil racist oppressive white male - and much more.
> Would it be a "unanimous" conclusion if it were a conclusion drawn by a singular person or entity?
Which singular person or entity should be responsible for determining what "hate speech" is? According to SJWiki I am a neurosexist for believing that men and women have different brains and that gender is not a social construct. Should SJWiki be trusted? According to the ADL, Gavin McInnes and Mike Cernovich are hate preachers. Should the ADL be trusted?
> Do you have an example of this being identified as hate speech?
Also it's a slippery slope because once the "hate speech" clampdown happens, we'll then be punished for microaggressions, so even if you're not a racist, you'll be seen as racist for asking what race or ethnicity someone is?
This is not offering your house for it. That would be if google was actually hosting their site on its servers. In this case it's a domain pointing to their content. As a registrar Google is serving the public and I doubt you can deny someone this service in a moral sense. Can a doctor deny to treat them if they end up in his office for serious injuries?
What if all registrars deny them, is it morally right to effectively erase them from the internet for simply expressing their thoughts?
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
But does that involve expending your resources allowing them to?
Also, isn't this Google/GoDaddy expressing THEIR speech by removing users who violate their TOS? Remember, GoDaddy was ok with hosting the site until an article defaming the woman who died on Saturday started making the rounds.
I will stop using Gmail and move my email elsewhere as google banned the accounts of Jordan B Peterson and Dennis Cooper, people who do NOT spread hate. Google is a SJW company.
